ED 302 087

AUTHORTITLE

DOCUMENT RESUME

FL 017 731

Teschner, Richard V."Provided There Is an Adequate Exposure to This L2 inthe School and Environment and Sufficient Motivationto Learn It": The Applicability (at times "pace"Cummins): of Majority-Language Immersion Programs toLimited- or Non-English-Proficient Spanish-L1Grade-School Populations in the United States-MexicanBorder-Area.

PUB DATE Oct 88NOTE 39p.; Revised version of a paper presented at the

Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of theSouthwest (October 1988).

PUB TYPE Information Analyses (070) -- Reports -Evaluative /Feasibility (142) -- Speeches/ConferencePapers (150)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS *Bilingual Education Programs; Comparative Analysis;

Educational Strategies; Elementary SecondaryEducation; *English (Second Language); *ImmersionPrograms; Langlage of Instruction; LearningMotivation; Limited English Speaking; Non EnglishSpeaking; *Program Effectiveness; Second LanguageLearning; *Spanish; Teaching Methods; TransitionalPrograms

IDENTIFIERS Cummins (James); *El Paso Independent Schdol DistrictTX; Whole Language Approach

ABSTRACTThe El Paso (Texas) Independent School District's

district -wide program-in majority-language (English) immersion isexamined to determine_the source of its success. The program'ssimilarities to and differences from the Canadian immersion model areexplored. The program's superior results in comparison with the samedistrict's transitional bilingual education programs are-looked at interms of James Cummins' discussions of bilingual education. It isconcluded that the immersion program's superiority over thetransitional programs can be explained largely in terms of itsmaximal use of English and its whole language approach. The bilingualimmersion program approach is recommended not as a panacea, but as asuperior educational alternative. A list of 79 references-isincluded. (MSE)

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* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made ** from the original document. *

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4

N. .CJ . "'Provided There Is An Adequate Exposure to This L2 in the School and Environment

(:).

lmj and Sufficient Motivation to Learn It': The Applicability (at times pace Cummins)C:1ref of Majority-Language Immersion Programs to Limited- or Nan-English-Proficient

Spanish -L1 Grade-School Populations in the United States-Mexican Border Area."*tilliVeRMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS

MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

T- eAd0. 2A Richard V. Teschner

TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESINFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."

University of Texas at El Paso

U.S. DEPARTMENTCF EDUCATOROffice of Educational ResearCh and Improvement

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATIONCENTER IERIC)

Thrs document has been reproduced asreceived from the person or organizationoriginating it.

O Minor changes have been made to improvereproduction quality.

Points of vieWOrOpiniOne stated in this docu-ment do not necessanly represent officialOERI posdion or PoliCY.

What most transitional bilingual education programs have in common is this:

non- or limited-English proficient students are taught English as a Second lang-

uage (ESL) during one class period or more on any given day, and are taught most

or all their "content" subjects through the medium of the home language. This

is what is broadly mandated in the various pieces of legislation both federal

and state to be approved since the passing by Congress in 1968 of the Bilingual

Education Act. Typical of state rules are those of Texas, as cited in the Texas

Education Code (1982, 21.454, "Program Content: Method of Instruction," p. 164):

to be established is "a full-time program of dual-language instruction that pro-

vides for learning basic skills in the primary language of the students of lim-

ited English proficiency who are enrolled in the program, and that provides for

carefully structured and sequenced mastery of English language skills." Because

of the limited flexibility--or perhaps outright contradition--set forth in the

Texas Education Agency's (1982) Comprehensive Instruction guidelines (section

77.353, "Program Content; Method of Instruction," p. 453), it is not possible

to speak of curricular uniformity in bilingual education programs in Texas let

tl alone throughout the United States; thus according to the Texas Education Agency,

Obilingual education shall develop basic skills of comprehending, speaking, read-

An1I ing and writing in the student's primary language as well as in English, and

*This article is a revised version of the Presidential Address presented at the

annual meeting of LASSO {Linguistic Association of the Southwest}, October, 1988.

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"subject matter and concepts" shall be taught in the student's primary language

as well as in English.

Enter. Canadian immersion education (henceforth CIE;, born, as is well

known, in 1967 in the Montreal suburb of St. Lambert, whose anglophone parents

were disturbed by the long-time failure of French FLES (Foreign Language in the

Elementary School) to produce French-proficient offspring, and who in any event

saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall, realizing that Quebec was rapidly

headed toward de jure French monolingualism, and that without French, future

generations could not earn a living in the province. CIE operates thus: All

children in the program's first year (which can be kindergarten or later) arrive

as monolinguals in the same home language (English in this instance). The teach-

er, who is bilingual though natively francophone, uses only the target language

(French) for all classroom purposes both instructional and non-instructional,

yet the children are allowed--indeed expected--to address the teacher in the

home language until they are ready for spontaneous, self-generated oral produc-

tion of the L2, which typically occurs in about a year. Aural comprehension

occurs sooner--within three to four months--and, in fact, begins to occur frcnn

the very beginning, in that initial language use is highly contextualized, and

can involve physical responses to teacher-generated requests.

At the heart of immersion-education is the use of the target language as

both medium of instruction and instructional text. At some point--for the St.

Lambert students it was at the end of the second grade, i.e., the students'

third year in the program--the home language is introduced as subject material.

The St. Lambert experimentals were subjected from the outset to a wide battery

of tests, and were compared on multiple measures with both monolingual anglo-

phone youngsters following the same school district's English-medium curriculum

and with monolingual francophone students following an analogous curriculum in

an adjacent district. To sum up the St. Lambert program's voluminous empirical

findings (see Lambert and Tucker 1972), replicated subsequently by scores of

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districts throughout Canada from the early seventies onward, the immersion

experimentals acquired French far more successfully than their older siblings

ever had done through FLES; showed no deficit in the academic content areas (in

particular math); and--despite initially depressed performance--showed no long-

range deficit in their ability to read and write English. In sum, CIE repre-

sented a success story, at least through about grade five, when researchers

such as Spilka (1976) began to note a leveling off in the students' progress

in French, typified by fossilizing interlanguage--the so-called Plateau Effect,

which subsequent work by Hammerly (1987) and others has confirmed remains oper-

ant all the way thrc ih the twelfth grade. The Plateau Effect would appear to

result from the ethnolinguistically-segregated nature of Canadian society:

though CIE students in those parts of Canada where anglophones potentially en-

joy access to sizeable natively-francophone communities were being educated via

French, the long-standing animosity between "the French" and "the English" in

Canada (see for example Wardhaugh 1982) prevented English-Canadian parents from

taking the final, logical step of enrolling their children in French-Canadian

schools so that peer influence could take effect, eroding the interlanguage mold

and giving rise to fully authentic Canadian French. But such was not to be. In

any event, Plateau Effect or no, the French the immersion students speak is con-

siderably better than the French the previous generations hardly ever learned.

Around the 'middle 1970s, when word of Canadian successes started filtering

south, American educators unconvinced by or opposed to what I have already des-

cribed as transitional bilingual education began to question whether the Canadian

model could be applied here. In his voluminous writings on bilingual education

and allied topics (see REFERENCES), the Irish-Canadian psychologist Jiml Cummins

for the most part argues--especially in his earlier writings--against the possi-

bility or the desirability of applying the Canadian immersion model to American

classrooms, serving limited- or non-English-proficient students, whom Cummins

terms language minorities. Thus in Cummins 1978c:855 he states that while "Im-

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4

mersion programs for majority language children have proved extremely success-

ful, resulting in high levels of second language (L2) skills at no cost to first

language (L1) skills," the "home-school language switch has been shown to result

in low levels of achievement in both Ll and L2 in minority language children."

In a discussion of his well-known "developmental interdependence" and "threshold"

hypotheses, Cummins (1979c:243) insists that "for the child whose input conceptual-

linguistic knowledge is not conducive to the development of literacy skills,"

the hypotheses imply that "initial instruction should be through the medium of

Ll." While Cummins admits subsequently (1981f:44) the existence of a variable--

ambiental exposure to target language--whose ramifications he deals with else-

where and which will be discussed later in the present paper, he continues to

insist that any increased exposure to L2 must be postponed ("this increased ex-

posure should not come in the early grades where the instructional emphasis

should be on Ll in order to develop the. conceptual apparatus required to make

English context-reduced input comprehensibTe").

However as Cummins' own work evolved, and research findings from various

programs were made manifest, Cummins increasingly admitted the possibility that

some features of Canadian-style immersion education might be practicable in

American language-minority school settings. A neutral, take-no-sides report

on several types of U.S. immersion programs for non-anglomonomatriphones appears

in Cummins 1983a:379-380. One year later (1984b:156), Cummins does not exclude

adaptations of the Canadian model when he writes that "In light of the analysis

of minority student underachievement presented in previous chapters, there ap-

pears to be little reason why such a 'genuine immersion' programme might not be

successful. However, the relevance of sociocultural variables associated with

student ambivalence vis-a-vis Ll and L2 suggests that there should be an Ll

component from the beginning of the programme." (Themes such as language and

cultural ambivalence along with increased emphasis on sociocultural variables

are characteristic of Cumilins' later wo;k and will be discussed below.) The

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5

same source offers up what could be termed a qualified endorsement of both

majority and minority language immersion programs of the sort that a very

small number of American school districts had cautiously begun to promote.

Sounding a note of warning about transitional bilingual education programs

that he develops elsewhere into a veritable symphony, Cummins writes: "That

there be genuine sustained reinforcement of minority students' Ll (as opposed

to its transitional use in most U.S. bilingual programmes) is probably ultimately

more important than the specific amount of Ll instructional time (e.g., 80% in

San Diego early grades, 20% in McAllen) or the language in which reading is

introduced. The relative efficacy of majority language and minority language

bilingual programmes is an empirical question at this point." (1984b:160) As

the quote suggests, a majority-language bilingual (immersion) program is one

which gives greater emphlsis to the languaye of the national majority population

(here English), while a minority-language bilingual program emphasizes the minor-

ity group's home and community language (here Spanish).

It is the purpose of the present paper to examine thoroughly a district-wide

bilingual program in majority-language immersion, that of the El Paso Independent

School District (henceforth EPISD); pinpoint that program's defects as well as

its successes; explain why that program has so far been achieving superior re-

sults when compared to those of the control group's program; and attempt to ex-

plain these results in terms of Cummins' discussions of bilingual education. At

present it is not possibile to respond to Cummins' suggestion that the relative

efficacy of majority versus minority language bilingual programs serving similar

populations be discussed, since no minority-language bilingual immersion program

has been subjected to any significant-empirical examination to date. 2 Instead,

the EPISD's bilingual program in majority-language immersion will be compared

with the same district's transitional bilingual education program.

What precisely is bilingual (majority-language) immersion, and how does it

differ from both the Canadian-style immersion education as well as transitional

6

bilingual education described above? Answers to these questions along with

the data presented here on the EPISD's bilingual immersion program (henceforth

BIP) derive from the EPISD's Office for Research and Evaluation's Interim Report

of the Five-Year Bilingual Education Pilot, 1986-87 SChool Year (henceforth

Interim Report), issued in-house July 1987 in response to a request from the

Texas Education Agency (TEA).3

Transitional bilingual education (henceforth TBE) allows for the possibil-

ity of teachers presenting content areas via the medium of the target language,

but in practice (or at least in the EPISD) does not do so; instead, English is

a subject matter only, taught for 60 minutes a day in grade one and 90 minutes

a day subsequently; all other subjects are taught in Spanish. By contrast, the

bilingual immersion program--BIP--uses mainly English as the medium of instruc-

tion for content subjects but makes a point of using what the Interim Report

calls "comprehensible English," i.e., a context-embeddedl code, abounding in

concrete referentiality. Students are not discouraged from responding in Span-

ish. though English responses are encouraged when the language of transmission

is English. BIP does use some Spanish as a medium of instruction for content

subjects from the very outset, and in that sense BIP differs from Canadian im-

mersion education (CIE), where only the target language is used for that purpose

initially. As is true of CIE, students are given daily instruction in Spanish

language arts (reading and writing); the major difference between the two prog-

rams is that BIP offers Spanish language arts from the very outset, while CIE

postpones Ll language arts until the end of grade two.

The Interim Report stresses that BIP should not be viewed as some sort of

flip side of the TBE instructional coin; indeed, one is struck by the extent to

which the difference between BIP and TBE is generational: TBE, conceived in

the 1960s.and first put into effect in El Paso around 1970 (though not expanded

district-wide until 1977), is clearly the intellectual offspring of Spanish-

English contrastive linguistics, a state-mandated course required since about

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1970 of every candidate for bilingual certification in Texas. As the Interim

Report notes, TBE focuses the child's attention contrastively on the details of

language, i.e., phonetics and grammar rules, while BIP is inspired by that the

report calls the Whole Language Approach, a reciprocal interactive system. ,

BIP consciously seeks to contextualize both oral and written language and to

use language in the classroom for authentic communicative purposes, or at least

for purposes as authentically communicative as a classroom setting allows.

There are three BIP components: English Language Arts (analogous in purpose

if not methodology to the ESL component of TBE), Native Language Cognitive

Development (where Spanish is consistently the medium and often the subject of

instruction), and science, social studies and math as "sheltered content areas."

("Sheltered" means English-medium input that is deliberately reduced in complex-

ity and abstractness, especially at the beginning; see for example Cummins

1979b). English Language Arts is taught for either 90 or 120 minutes per day,

depending on the level of the students; the Interim Report states that the

methods employed are Natural Approach, Total Physical Response, and other com-

municative orientations. Reading and writing are fostered through such inter-

active process strategies as Storytelling, Daily Journal Writing, and Group and

Individual Publishing. Native Language Cognitive Development is offered for

from 60 to 90 minutes per day; according to the Interim Report (1987:10), the

"objective of this component is to develop concepts, literacy, cognition and

critical thinking skills in Spanish. It is during this period that instruction

and student-teacher interaction are entirely in Spanish. The more demanding

content area concepts may also be introduced during Native Language Cognitive

Development."

How well do BIP and TBE students test? Since Chapter 77 of the Texas Ad-

ministrative Code (1982) calls for annual testing of all- students identified as

limited English proficient, including all those enrolled in the EPISD in either

TBE or BIP, the Interim Report was able to present data from over a thousand

individuals, all of whom took the reading and language arts sections of the Iowa

Tests of Basic Skills and the Oral Language Dominance Measure as well as "TEAMS,"

the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills test. My reportage of test

results will focus on grade three (the highest reached by BIP at time of test-

ing), in part because not all grade one (and sometimes not all grade two) students

are tested in all subjects for a variety of reasons. (Thus state law allows stu-

dents whose language is so limited that they cannot take the test to be exempted

from it.) In any event, it is the grade three scores that will be of greatest

interest to us. Before reporting any test results I should make it clear that

while I am in sympathy and essential agreement with the conclusions reached by

my antepenultimate predecessor in this office, Carole Edelsky, in her 1985 LASSO

presidential address "The Effect of 'Theory' on Theory--And Other. Phenomena"

(published in revised form as Edelsky 1984, and expanded upon as Edelsky et al.

1983), I admit I cannot argue with Cummins and Swain (1983:27) in their response

to Edelsky et al. 1983 when they (C & S) state: " . . . we do not believe that

the real world is sufficiently clear cut to dismiss all uses of standardized

tests, under all conditions, for all students as 'irrelevant nonsense'." Cummins

and Swain aptly point out that " . . . standardized tests can provide useful in-

formation under some conditions and for some students. For example, the spread

of French immersion programs across Canada is due in no small measure to the

repeated finding that students did not suffer {a decline in} English academic

skills as measured by standardized norm-referenced tests." (Cummins and Swain

1983:28-29)

For those grade three students tested district-wide in March of 1987, the

normal-curve-equivalent-based mean scores were higher for BIP students than

for TBE students in all three subject areas of the English-medium Iowa Test

(reading, language and math), though the BIP advantage was statistically sig-

nificant only for reading and language, with the math means too close to call.

It should be noted that both BIP and TBE scores were lowest in reading and

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highest in language. The BIP mean scores exactly equalled the national average

and the TBE scores fell five points below it.

The EPISD uses the Oral Language Dominance Measure as its oral language

testing instrument in grades one through three; this test measures spoken

language proficiency in both English and Spanish, and its scale ranges from

a low of one to a high of five. It is on the English proficiency component

that BIP students unequivocally outperform their TBE peers: in grade three,

74% of BIP students but only 56% of TBE students achieved the high score of

five, and only 18% of BIP students versus 29% of TBEs scored between one and

three, i.e., low. What about spoken language proficiency in Spanish? In grade

one, 84% of BIP and 88% of TBE students achieved the highest scores, in grade

two 96% and 98% respectively, and in grade three 97% of both cohorts did so.

There is little if any difference then between BIP and TBE when it comes to

maintaining and developing oral proficiency in Spanish; theTBEs may have a

slightly higher score at first but the two groups perform at an equal--and an

equally high--level by grade three.

Since 1979, school districts in Texas have been required by law to parti-

cipate in a State-developed minimum basic skills testing program, whose current

version is the TEAMS test referred to earlier. These are criterion-referenced

tests, i.e., measurement instruments that relate test items to specific learning

objectives or levels of proficiency in skills which students have been taught.

EPISD students take TEAMS in grades 1, 3 and 5--this last not reported here

since the BIP program had only entered its third year as of March 1987. Span-

ish versions of TEAMS for grades one and three were administered for the first

time in that year. EPISD Language Proficiency Assessment Committees decided

which students would take the Spanish version and which the English version.

In grade three, 87% of the BIP students (n = 535) and 66% of the TBE students

(n = 529) took the English TEAMS while only 13% BIP students (80) but 34%

TBE students (268) took the Spanish teams. While the low number--both absolute

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and relative--of BIP students taking the Spanish TEAMS may vitiate the validity

of the comparisons, I will go ahead and present them anyway if only for their

heuristic value.

Both groups did equally well on the English version of the TEAMS math

test (80% mean mastery), and almost as well as the district mean (85%). While

the BIP students' English reading scores (47% mastery) exceeded TBE students'

(39%), and at statistical significance, the disparity between these levels of

mastery and the mean district-wide non-bilingual-program-mastery level- -70 % --

bears thinking about. Similar concern can be shOwn about English writing scores:

BIP 44% mastery, TBE 40% mastery, district-wide 65% mastery. On the Spanish ver-

sion of the math test, the tables are turned (though again, bear in mind that

the Spanish-version BIP cohort is small): BIP 74% mastery, TBE 87% mastery,

state-wide bilingualprogram 79% mastery. (We can assume that "state-wide

bilingual program" means "TBE elsewhere in Texas.") Thus in math in Spanish,

the 80 BIP students undershot the state-wide mark by five percentage points

and the 268 TBE students exceeded it by eight. In Spanish reading, both El

Paso groups outperformed state means: TBE 97% mastery, BIP 89% mastery, and

86% state-wide mastery. Similar results are manifest in Spanish writing: 95%

TBE mastery, 91% BIP mastery, and 86% state-wide mastery.

In general terms, the results from these three batteries of tests provide

very suggettive evidence supporting several conclusions.

Conclusion number one appears commonsensical, and is not entirely gainsaid

by Cummins despite his repeated opposition to what he terms the fallacy of the

"maximum exposure assumption" (thus Cummins 1980c:51, 1984c:33, 1984:264-265):

the more you are exposed to meaningful input in a language, the better you will

do in it. BIP students did better--though in just :me component to any statis-

tical significance--on the Iowa tests, which are administered via English; un-

equivocally outperformed TBE students on the English portion of the Oral Language

Dominance Measure; and did better at English writing and especially English

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reading as measured by, the TEAMS test. Only in the TEAMS test's English-version

math exam did both groups do equally well on an English-medium test. But as the

Interim Report (1987:61) notes, "BIP's success in mathematics is interesting in

light of a major argument for {transitional bilingual education} : that content

area instruction must be carried out in Spanish to ensure continuation of {con-

tent area} learning while English is being learned." Of course the argument

works both ways: the fact that TBE students did as well as their BIP kers on

an English-medium math exam has demonstrated that in math at least, knowledge

acquired via the home language readily transfers into the target language. BIP

students, then, are ahead of their TBE peers in English by whatever measurement,

and have not fallen behind them in a crucial content area such as mathematics.

Conclusion number two is not surprising in light of what we have long known

from the research on the products of Canadian immersion education: that BIP

students' performance in Ll language arts (here Spanish) did not differ greatly

from the performance of their TBE counterpa %s who, save for those 60 or 90

minutes a day of ESL, have been educated solely via the medium of the L2. By

the third grade, thp two groups' scores in Spanish oral proficiency are iden-

tical. Recall, however, that there is one important difference between Canadian-

style immersion and El Paso-style BIP: that BIP students are given significant

amounts of Spanish language arts from the very beginning of the program, and

note that even this coursework did not enable BIP students to fully equal--let

alone surpass--the TBE students on the Spanish-medium reading and writLa sec-

tions of tile TEAMS test; though the BIP scores were close, TBE scores lead. So

if the goal of bilingual education is to prOuucl students whose bilingualism is

fully balaticA in all four skills, then BIP is not quite adequate, and a cer-

tain amount of additional work both in and via Spanish may be needed.

The above conclusions constitute a corallary to Cummins in that they demons-

trate the efficacy of an L1- inclusive majority-language immersion program in a

setting such as El Paso, as Cummins in his later writings hypothesized might be

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possible among language-minority students. Of course El Paso's language min-

ority may not be what Cummins had in mind when he wrote of language minorities,

since in El Paso, nearly 70% of the population is ethnically Hispanic, and per-

haps an equal percentage,of El Paso's Hispanics are Spanish- retentive and/or

-preferent, whether as Spanish monolinguals, Spanish dominants, or balanced

bilinguals. At any given moment, then, at least as much Spanish as English is

being spoken throughout El Paso. Even more to the point, most of those neighbor-

hoods whose schools offer BIP or TBE programs are Spanish-retentive, some strongly

so. In a wider, national context, of course, Spanish is a minority language even

in places like El Paso, yet from a local vantage point it is a very special kind

of minority language.

It beart noting--and here we leave Cummins temporarily--that the goal of

bilingual education in Texas at present is petfectly clear: to mainstream pupils

into English-medium coursework. On this point, the laws of Texas are upon us;

thus I quote from the Texas Education Cod:. 121.45l, Subchapter L, Bilingual

Education and Special Language Programs, "State Policy"):

Public schools are responsible for providing full opportunity for all

students to. become competent in speaking, reading, writing, and com-

prehending the English language. ... The legislature recognizes that

the mastery of basic English language skills is a prerequisite for

effective participation in the state's educational program. The

legislature believes that bilingual education and special language

programs can meet the needs of these students and facilitate their

integration into the regular school curriculum. ... Bilingual edu-

cation or special language programs as defined by this Act shall be

taught {sic} in the public schools only for the purpose of assisting

the learning ability of limited English proficiency students aJd to

enhance the English language.

And there is more, elsewhere, along these same lines. Barring a radical change

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in these laws - -and I foresee none, at least not in the next three or four

decades--the question perforcedly becomes: which of the EPISD's two programs--

BIP or TBE--does the better job of preparing students for that all-important

transition into the all-English schoolday? The El Paso interim data would

indicate that BIP does so. BIP students make more progress in all facets of

English in three years than TBE students--and equal progress in content areas-r

so BIP students will do better in the English-language classroom. While Cum-

mins has argued forcefully (1980a:96 and elsewhere) that since research sug-

gests that "'equality' of academic potential and performande is not attained

{by language-mincrity students} until the later grades of elementary school

. . . {therefore} the full benefit of bilingual instruction may not become ap-

parent until the fifth or sixth year of instruction," it is nontheless counter-

intuitive to assume that TBE students, demonstrably behind in English at the

end of grade three, will have achieved parity with the products of BIP by

grade five. Such at least is my prediction; suffice-it to say that the results

of the final EPISD report, due to be issued the summer of 1989 following the

completion of grade five by both cohorts, are awaited with considerable interest.

That BIP does a better job than TBE is a position with which classroom

teachers themselves agree. The EPISD distributed questionnaires to every BIP

and TBE teaeler in the appropriate grades throughout the district. Rate of

response was remarkably high, as 280 TBE teachers (84%) and 231 BIP teachers

(86%) returned filled -out questionnaires. In general, BIP teachers viewed

their programs much more positively than did TBE teachers theirs. (It should

be noted that almost without exception, teachers in the EPISD's bilingual

programs are bilingual native hispanophones themselves.) The questionnaire

contained ten statements--two modified to reflect the two programs' differing

realities, one deleted from the BIP questionnaire altogether--with which the

respondents were to agree or disagree on a six-point scale (though for the

purpose of tabulation, "disagree" ratings one and two and "agree" ratings

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five and six were colapsed into single categories). Thus 60% of BIP versus

only 40% of TBE instructors agreed that "Most students will succeed in the

regular program after they complete" the program now enrolled in, and 20%

of TBE versus only 7% of BIP instructors disagreed with that statement. Remark-

able discrepancy exists between the two groups' reactions to -a statement about

whether each one's program "notivates students to learn English": 75% of the

BIP versus only 36% of the TBE faculty agreed theirs does, and 32% of the TBE

instructors felt that their program does not so motivate. A highly analogous

statement--the program "successfully develops students' oral English skills"--

drew nearly identical responses: 74% BIP vs. only 37% of the TBE faculty agreed,

and a substantial 28% of the TBE faculty (vs. only 5% of the BIP faculty) dis-

agreed. The two groups were almost equal in their response to the statement

"The program develops and maintains students' Spanish language skills" (59%

TBE and 60% BIP agreement); only small percentages--7% TBE, 4% BIP faculty- -

disagreed with this statement. Similar near-equality reigned in faculty res-

ponses to the following: the program "is successful in teaching children to

read in" Spanish (if TBE) or English (if BIP). Since the BIP program's child-

ren read in English from the very outset, only TBE instructors were asked to

respond to the following statement: "Most students in the program successfully

transfer to reading in English"; 36% agreed, 22% felt they did not, and the

plurality (42%) neither agreed nor disagreed. Substantive differences were

also revealed in responses to three more statements: "This program motivates

students to read and enjoy stories" (BIP 79% agreement and 3% disagreement,

TBE 57% agreement and 14% disagreement); this program "successfully develops

students' grammar, punctuation and spelling skills" (BIP 65% agreement and 11%

disagreement, TBE 44% agreement and 22% disagreement); and this program "en-

courages students to positively identify with their cultural heritage" (BIP

64% agreement and 7% disagreement, TBE 63% agreemenc and 13% disagreement).

The lower level of teacher enthusiasm for TBE as manifested in responses to

15

this last statement is especially striking, since TBE's all-Spanish-in-the-

content-areas curriculum was clearly intended to produce precisely the effect

stated: positive identification with the home language's cultural heritage.

Equally striking is TBE faculty response to the last of the ten statements

("Students in the program benefit from being taught the content areas in Span-

ish"): a very bare majority (51%) agreed, while slightly more than one ot.t of

five (21%) disagreed, and 28% neither agreed nor disagreed. It should be noted

at this point that the overwhelming majority of the teachers in the EPISD's bi-

lingual programs received their training in the University of Texas at El Paso's

College of Education, all of whose bilingual education faculty have long supported

transitional bilingual education with vocal enthusiasm, and that if there is one

concept which is central to the core of that program, it is that students bene-

fit from being taught the content areas in Spanish. (By way of contrast, 83%

of BIP instructors agreed that students in their program "benefit from being

taught the content areas in English" and only 3% disagreed.)

None of these findings concerning the superior performance of BIP students

on standardized tests and the teachers' perceptions of BIP as superior- to TBE

should be surprising to the reader of Cummins, since by 1980 Cummins had reached

the conclusion that "the psychoeducational assumptions underlying transitional

programs are largely invalid." (1980a:83)- Cummins bases this assertion on two

considerations: the invalidity of what Cummins terms the "linguistic mismatch"

hypothesis, and the strong likelihood that "the educational benefits of bi-

lingual education may be cumulative, and thus, aborting the program at an

early stage is unlikely to realize these benefits." (ibid.) The second of

these considerations will not be dealt with here, all the more so because none

of the students from either program had been exited from it, at time of testing

(and would not, indeed, be exited until the end of the fifth grade). The first

consideration--the linguistic mismatch hypothesis--is based on the seemingly

logical assumption that children will only learn well if they are instructed

16

16

via the language they already know well, i.e., 11, an assumption given consid-

erable impetus by the oft-cited 1953 UNESCO report (UNESCO 1953). Cummins

argues that considerable research findings have invalidated linguistic mis-

match as a general tenet; prominent among the findings are the conclusions

drawn from Canada's immersion programs: their products have acquired (along

with French) a course-content mastery that invariably equals or exceeds that

achieved by the student in the English-medium control group. Thus linguistic

mismatch i.e. home-school language switch alone can no longer be used as the

prime let alone the sole justification of bilingual education.

While the conclusion to be drawn from my analysis so far is that the super-

iority of BIP over TBE can be explained largely in terms of BIP's maximal use

of English versus TBE's minimal use of it, one cannot overlook the strong like-

lihood that the context of English exposure in BIP--the reciprocal interactive

"Whole Language Approach" referred to earlier--is at least as important a

Predictive factor as is the fact of greater exposure itself. By 1983, Cummins

had begun to speak frequently of the importance of comprehensible input ("Lang-

uage acquisition is largely dependent on students receiving sufficient compre-

hensible input in the target language" (1983a:373)) and to cite the works of

Stephen Krashen often. Underlying the principle of comprehensible input "is

the importance of meaningful communication. When this central language func-

tion is ignored in classroom instruction, learning is likely to be by rote and

supported only by extrinsic motivation." (Cummins 1983a:377) Cummins speaks

directly to the superiority of programs such as BIP when he notes that the

contrast between "immersion and traditional second-language programs can be

interpreted within the framework of the comprehensible input principle -in that

communication between teacher and students in the immersiTfirogram is embedded

in a meaningful concrete context and supported by a wide range of paralinguistic

cues which allow students to. infer the intended meaning and simultaneously

acquire the second language. This, however, is not the case in traditional

17

second-language programs which tend to emphasize language drills in isolation

from authentic communication." (1983a:378) Reference to the importance of

reciprocal interactive L2 facilitation is found elsewhere throughout Cummins'

more recent writings (1981f:14, 1983b:112-113 and 125, 1984b:114 and 224-225,

1984f:67). Only by factoring out one of the two probable determinants of BIP's

success--on the one hand the higher degree of exposure to English, on the other

hand BIP's use of a reciprocal interactive approach to learning versus TBE's

more traditional pedagogy--could this issue be clarified. In 1983 Cuiddins

noted that "virtually no research information is available on the effects of

monolingual immersion for minority students" (19834i379), and this is precisely

the type of information we would need in order to determine which aspect of BIP

accounted for its success or whether both aspects of the program were equally

responsible for the superiority of its results.

I have already noted that the overwhelming reality of American bilingual

education is its intent to serve as a transition to "mainstream" education via

English. At least by the time the initially hispanomonomatriphonic youngster

who began a bilingual program in kindergarten or first grade reaches grade

seven (and often before), he or she is expected to have mastered enough English

to handle a program whose content areas are taught solely in that language.

While recalling that at least in the EPISD the product of whichever bilingual

program--BIP or TBE--is exempted from entering the mainstream classroom until

grade seven if necessary if his or her command of English is still judged in-

adequate, I am nonetheless bothered by the scores achieved by BIP and TBE

students alike on the grade three TEAMS tests of English reading and writing.

It will be recalled that while BIPs achieved a 47 percentile and thereby

did better than TBEs, who only achieved a reading score of 39, the district

as a whole, i.e., those 3,860 students participating in the English version of

the TEAMS reading test in grade three, achieved a 70 percentile average. If

We break down the reading test score into its component parts, we note that

18

18

the district-wide score particularly outdistances the BIP and the TBE scores in

the areas of "sight words," "context clues" and "predicting outcomes," that is,

in the realm of general comprehension as opposed to mechanics ("phonics," "table

of contents" and the like). Scores from the grade three. TEAMS writing test

(English version) are similarly disturbing. The BIP advantage almost disappears

(44th percentile as opposed to a TBE 40th percentile), and neither group even

approaches the district-wide percentile, which is 65. Again, the differences

are at their most evident in global activities; thus on "passing score on para-

graph," i.e., a free composition exercise which required students to generate

original language rather than manipulate prepared language, BIP students scored

54, TBE students 50, and district-wide 75; differences between the three groups

on "proofreading," "spelling," "punctuation," "capitalization" and the like

were minimal by comparison.

It is not for nothing that BIP is an immersion program. Like the products

of Canadian immersion in French, El Paso hispanomonomatriphones in English BIP

score noticeably better in English and on tests using English than their "Eng-

lish FLES" TBE counterparts, but not as well as native speakers of the target

language. Like the Canadian immersion students, the El Paso BIPs are in effect

isolated from peer groups which are monolingual in the target language, and

while the Canadian analogy begins to break down at this point at least partially,

the linguistic consequences are similar. The chief difference between the two

situations is that for reasons based as much on class as on ethnicity, the aver-

age El Paso hispanomonomatriphonic child typically lacks access to social net-

works that are monolingual in English, while the typical Anglo-Canadian does

not take advantage of the access putatively available. In El Paso, "neighbor-

hood" is the chief determinant of language choice (see Teschner 1981): some

neighborhoods--not surprisingly those where hispanophones enjoyed primacy of

settlement, or where Hispanics constitute almost a totality of the population- -

are simply known as "Spanish-speaking," and social pressures insure that Hispan-

19

ics from outside those neighborhoods speak Spanish when visiting them, whether

Spanish is or is not the outsiders' preferred or dominant language. When en-

gaged in commercial or social activity outside the Spanish-bastion areas, their

residents readily find fellow Hispanics to interact with, and in Spanish. This

is not to make the claim that in. El Paso, all intra-Hispanic interaction takes

place exclusively in Spanish, or that the majority of El Paso Hispanics are

monolingual in that language. On the contrary, shift to English is taking

place; yet immigration from Mexico is also proceeding apace. What character-

izes El Paso then is a steady-state bilingualism manifesting a slow shift to

English dominance and/or preference (though almost never English monolingual-

ism), alongside a steady influx of monolingual hispanophones and a constant

level of overall societal Spanish dominance and/or preference. In effect, for

every Hispanic who shifts to English dominance and/or preference, a monolingual

hispanophone is added to the population, particularly in.certain neighborhoods,

which brings us back to the point at issue: the degree to which an immersion

program or for that matter any program can provide the child of certain- neigh-

borhoods, certain backgroundswith the meaningful exposure that he or she needs

to achieve parity on English-medium test scores--not to mention (following Edel-

sky) all those far-more relevant activities inside school and out--with those

"district-wide" students whose home-language circumstances or neighborhoods

of residence have enabled them to bring proficient English to school from the

outset, whether they also speak Spanish or not.

I have long maintained (see Teschner 198C, 1981, 1982, 1983, Parisi and

Teschner 1984) that, paradoxically, in an area where bilingualism is both

profuse and steady-state, i.e., not accompanied by wide-scale shift, individ-

ual acquisition of the area's second language is typically problematic: be-

cause there is always someone around who speaks your primary language, incen-

tives to become proficient in the other tongue are correspondingly reduced.

Not that for our children in BIP and TBE programs these incentives are lack-

20

20

ing altogether. A 1982 UTEP masters thesis survey (Hammersmith 1982) shows

that what amounts to a totality of parents of children in El Paso's bilingual

programs--TBE only at the time--want their offspring to learn English, and

fully expect that the schools will achieve that goal.. Yet--the survey re-

veals--few if any of these parents speak.English at home or expect that their

children will become anglicized; indeed, they are confident that their child-

ren will remain as loyal to language, class and culture as they themselves

have been. Once again we are in Canada, mutatis mutandis, save for the not-

inconsiderable differences in social class between the two populations. Which

brings us una vez encore to the central question, restated somewhat in light

of what I have just discussed: can the task of producing proficient bi-

linguals be a school task alone? Obviously this question is rhetorical,

though only in part In some El Paso neighborhoods, the products of BIP and

even TBE will experience integration--eventually or even rapidly--into a peer

population which is English- preferent, -dominant, or -monolingual. In other

neighborhoods, the products of bilingual schooling are likely to remain

segregated or largely so, either because they live in public housing projects

(always prone to ostracism and self-ostracization), or because the neighborhood

is both historically and statistically Spanish-monolingual or nearly so.

The quote that appears in the title of the present paper has been taken

from Housen and Baetens Beardsmore (1987:87). By placing such a caveat in such

a prominent position I do not mean to imply that Cummins is unaware of the impor-

tance of adequate exposure to the L2 in school and environment, along with suf-

ficient motivation to learn it Such is not the case. In any early explanation

of his developmental interdependence hypothesis, for example, Cummins explicitly

cites environmental sufficiency as a necessary variable (" . . instruction is

effective in promoting CALP which will manifest itself in both languages given

adequate motivation and exposure to both languages either in school or wider

environment . . . Thus, the relationships . . . presuppose motivational in-

1)4 1.044

21

volvement and adequate exposure to Ll and/or L2." (1979a204),. Similar

sentiments appear in Cummins 1980a:88 and 90, 1980b:185, 1984b: -100 ("For

example, minority children' are unlikely to perforili adequately in English if

exposure to English has been minimal")', 1984b:265 -(" . . . students instructed4

for much of the day through a minority language Will perform at least as well

in English academic skills as equivalent students instructed totally through

English, given adequate motivation to learn English and sufficient exposure

to the language either within or,outside school"), and 1984c:33. The problem

is that Cummins not Infrequently makes assumptions elsewhere which teaOly lend

themselves to misinterpretation or what appears to be an outright dismissal

of the environmental/motivational caveat, sometimes by Cummins himself, as

quotes from Cummins earlier in this paper have shown (1979c:243, 1981f:44).

Thus the explicit assumption in 1980b:185 ("Because the majority language is

the language of the streets and of T.V. there is usually no lack of exposure

or motivation to acquire it"), the patently site-specific conclusion which

explains away the findings of a Toronto study ("Bhatnager (1980) reports that

immigrant students who used Ll exclusively with parents and siblings also per-

formed significantly worse than those who used both Ll and L2. However, it

seems likely that this finding can be attributed to the fact that only those

students who had immigrated relatively recently would use Ll exclusively" (1981f:

33, emphasis added)), the assumption contained in 1984b:158 (" . . . the appro-

priate implication from the Canadian immersion data is that the language whose

development is most likely to-be neglected (i.e. the minority or subordinate

language) should be strongly promoted in the school programme in order to pro-

duce an additive form of bilingualism" (emphasis added)), and the unexamined

assumptions made by McLaughlin 1984-85 and restated uncritically by Wesche

(1987:76) in her review of McLaughlin, who, "in the context of his discussion

of why Canadian immersion models are not appropriate for minority language

children . . . proposes 'reverse immersion' for children who come to school

22.

22

without English skills. In this model the weaker (first) language would be

taught almost exclusively durinOhe primary years, while oral second (English)

language skills would initially be absorbed on the playground and in activities

requiring little English proficiency . . . " (How is it possible to speak of

Ll as the weaker language in children who come to s:hool without any L2?)

The chief problem with Cummins here is an entirely understandable Canado-

centrism, which has prompted him on more than one occasion to forget the advice

that he himself had given in an early publication (Cummins and Gulutsan 1974:

261): " . . . each bilingual education project must be planned according to

the needs of the particular area in which it is located . . . " Thus what is

valid for 'a° presumably bilingual-by-first-grade groups of francophone students

in Winnipeg, an English-dominant city in a markedly English-dominant region

(H4bert 1976, as cited in Cummins 1979c and elsewhere) cannot be assumed as

valid for all alloglots everywhere, and is demonstrably not valid for the typi-

cal LEP or NEP hispanophone El Paso six year old. As Wong-Fillmore has noted,

one cannot take "street" acquisition for granted: "'Contrary to the usual

assumption that children learn language mainly from peers outside the classroom

and not from teachers, it appears that for many LEP students the only place in

which they come into regular contact with English speakers is at school. Thus,

language learning, if it is going to take place at all, is going to have to

happen at school. (p. 19 {of Gass and Madden 1988})"(Scarcella and Perkins

1987:350). Wong-Fillmore leaves unanswered the degree to which "playground"

acquisition can be-predicted, as well she might, given the vast host of varia-

bles attendant thereunto: ratio of Lx-monolingual to Ly-monolingual children

and degree and stability of bilingualism; nature of the relationship between

speakers of Lx and Ly in the narrower and wider communities; stability of Lx/

Ly settlement in that community (i.e., how rapidly is the neighborhood changing?);

expectations regarding the direction of language shift if any; social class and

its relationship to expected patterns of communication--in short, the entire

23

23

gamut of topics investigated by ethnographers and sociolinguists.

In school/community settings typified by considerable degrees of isolation,

the magic of immersion education is hard-pressed to work--to the extent that

the immersion classroom alone can be counted on to produce much more than a

mere approximation of the target language (see for example Hammerly 1987 and

my own discussion below). This paper has sounded this theme before and will

now examine it in greater depth.

Until recently, Cummins' own writings took the unqualified or near-

unqualified success of Canadian immersion education (CIE) as a given, to be

referred to in passing as an example of the easy feasibility of home-school

language switch at least for majority-language children (see for example

1984b:13). His first admission that Canadian anglomonomatriphones' command

of French might be less than had been thought came in 1983, when he admits that

"In terms of French achievement, by grade 6 students' oral and written recep-

tive skills are close to those of native speakers. However, although they

are fluent, their productive skills are not native-like." (1983a:375) It was

not until 1986 that Cummins (writing with Merrill Swain) fully credited the

degree to which adequate interactive exposure t,5-the L2 is necessary for the

alloglot to become proficient in it. In a discussion of differences between

native speakers and CIE students, Cummins and Swain write that these

. . .were highly significant on most grammatical measures and on

those discourse and sociolinguistic measures where grammatical know-

ledge was essential for the production of correct linguistic forms.

Additionally, it has been found that early immersion students approach

native-speaker levels of proficiency in French reading and listening

measures {i.e., in receptive skills} by the end of elementary school

but significant differences remain with respect to oral and written

{i.e., productive} grammatical skills . . . " (1986:209)

Why, the authors ask, do "immigrant students attain proficient L2 grammatical

24

24

skills within a relatively short time whereas French immersion students continue

to experience diffitulty in these areas?" (Swain and Cummins 1986:211) The

answer is a logical extension of their findings anent exposure: "The same hypo-

these appear relevant to this phenomenon. Immigrant students tend to-gain

peer-appropriate grammatical skill's, at least in the oral modality, considerably

more rapidly than is the case for immersion students precisely because their

contact with and use of the L2 is far greater." (ibid.) In the El Paso context,

"provided that" rather than "because" would appear to be the more appropriate

conjunctive element--"'provided that' their contact with and use of the L2 is

far greater (or sufficient)."

Recent publications by Canadians give the distinct impression that CIE is

undergoing considerable reevaluation. Though Swain and Lapkin (1986) continue

to emphasize the positive aspects of CIE even as they note the negative, a half-

dozen other researchers have come down increasingly hard on CIE for producing

just the sort of graduates who "continue to experience difficulty" in French

production after thousands and thousands of hours of classroom exposure; thus

Adiv (1980), Lister (1987), Pawley (1985), Pellerin and Hammerly (1986), Singh

(1986), and in particular Hammerly (1987), who continued Spilka (1976)'s pion-

eering examination of the oral production of French immersion students. Ham-

merly goes so far as to state that CIE is "linguistically . . . a failure" and

that it reveals."irremediable problems" (Hammerly 1987:399).

It is clear from the works just cited as well as (more importantly for

our immediate purposes) Cummins and Swain themselves that classroom settings

alone cannot be expected to produce BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative

Skills) though they are capable of developing CALP (Cognitive Academic Language

Proficiency). I have deliberately employed these dichotomizing acronyms, which

Cummins himself has now abandoned (in favor of "context-embedded" and "context-

reduced"--see 1983b:125 et alibi), so as to draw attention to the changes in

the way that Cummins views the acquisition of the ability to talk with peers,

25

25

among other activities (as opposed to perfor. On tests, etc.). Whereas the

early CUMmins gave the impression that BICS essentially developed by, itself,

given proper exposure and motivation, by 1980 CumMins states that " . . . in an

L2 context, where proficiency is as yet inadequately developed, a wider range

of interpersonal communicative tasks are cognitively demanding than in an Ll

context" (1980c:31-32), and three years later is cited (in John 011er's intro-

duction to Cummins' contribution to the former's volume on testing) as explic-

itly recognizing that "face-to-face activities can be cognitively demanding,

i.e., require inference etc.' (Cummins, personal communication . . . )." (1983b:

108) Under conditions of social isolation from monomatriphonic speakers of the

majority language, "BICS" acquisition may take longer than the time Cummins

has posited, on the basis of his Toronto findings, as Wald (1984:61) points

out in a commentary on Cummins' hypotheses:

The claim that second language fluency is generally achieved in

one and a half to two years does not correspond to the behavioral

characteristics observed for 10-12 year old Mexican American children

in the Los Angeles area. Quite generally, it has been found that

students of less than four to five years residence in an English-

speaking {sic?} environment preferred Spanish in spontaneous con-

versation, and have difficulty in competing for the floor in English

with age -mates of earlier ages of arrival . . .

As we know from Swain (1983 {as reported on by Housen and Baetens Beards-

more 1987:89 }, from whom I quote at length as befits the importance of the

commentary, "comprehensible input, or the i + 1 hypothesis alone, is insuffi-

cient for the acquisition of high levels of L2 proficiency, based on results

obtained on Canadian grade 6 immersion pupils," who had--using Cummins' early

terminology--"acquired CALP" quite nicely but lacked important aspects of BICS

(again to oversimplify).

These subjects performed satisfactorily on subject matter tests'and

LI4c.

26

consequently must have understood what was taught through the L2,

which suggests that it is not input per se that is important to L2

acquisition, but input that occurs in interaction where meaning is

negotiated. With immersion pupils, input is derived mainly from

listening to teacher talk, so the less than native-like grammatical

competence can only be accounted for by the inadequacy of the input

hypothesis. On the other hand, Swain claims that output fulfills

a vital role in the process of L2 acquisition in that it enables

the acquirer to apply the available linguistic resources in a mean-

ingful way. This pushes the acquirer toward the delivery of a mes-

sage that is conveyed as precisely, coherently, and appropriately

as possible, enabling experimentation with target language structures

by trial and error. Further, output forces the acquirer to pay equal

-atthntion to-semantic and syntactic features, whereas the decoding of

input allows for meaning to be derived from a combination of linguis-

tic and extra-linguistic cues without any necessary focus on struc-

ture. {Immersion students} are limited in output because the wider

environment does not sufficiently =push the speaker ir. the,active use

of the L2. Nor do immersion children-get much opportunity to inter-

act with native-speaker peers of the target language.

While ambiental- conditions among BIP students in El Paso and similar settings do

not constitute exact replicas of conditions .1 Canada as these inform the con-

clusions of Swain and others, an analogy can nonetheless be made. In the BIP

El Paso context one must speak of wider environments, plural: on the one hand

a wider environment of family, friends and neighbors with whom the Ll (Spanish)

is patently the expected medium of communication, and on the other hand a wider

environment that consists of both the immediate expectations of the school sys-

tem and the future expectations of the wider society - -these latter however dil-

uted by the obvious presence of Spanish' as in some respects a co-equal "public"

27

27

language for significant numbers of adult Hispanics in places like El Paso and

elsewhere. The point is that though environmental pressures toward English are

certainly stronger in the BIP El Paso context than they are toward French among

immersion students in, say, Vancouver, Edmonton or Winnipeg, they are not as

strong as are similar pressures toward English among the immigrant students of

Toronto with whom Cummins is most familiar. As is so often the case in socio-

linguistics, we are dealing not with a dichotomy but with a continuum.

At this point in my analysis the temptation is strong to folio.; intuition

("common sense") and recommend that BIP--let alone TBE--be replaced by what

Cummins has described as monolingual majority-language immersion programs "which

take into account the need to provide minority students with modified second-

language input but which dispense with bilingual teachers and first-language

literacy promotion." (1983a:379) While -I do not deny that the empirical find-

ings form such a program in El Paso would be of considerable interest to research-

ers, nor the possibility that an MIP (monolingual immersion program) might prove

a not-unattractive educational alternative under cer:ain circumstances, I never-

theless agree with Cummins' conclusion that for some types of alloglottic grade-

school populations, an Ll component is a critical necessity. Cummins advocates

the inclusion of Ll in the curriculum on two grounds: first, that the devel-

opmental interdependence and the threshold hypotheses predict that cognitive

grWti in L2 is-contingent upon continued cognitive development in Ll (and vice

versa), and, second, that "An examination of global trends in the educational

achievement of minority language children suggest that the groups who perform

poorly in school are those who have been discriminated against economically

and educationally and, as a consequence, are characterized by insecurity in

relation to their own language and culture and ambivalence towards the dominant

language and culture of the society . . . (1984a:64) Of the two arguments I

find the second the far more compelling, not only because of the doubts that

Martin-Jones and Romaine (1986) and others have cast on the feasibility of

28

28

subjecting a developmental interdependence hypothesis to empirical examination

as a single variable, but--and in larger part--because of what Cummins himself

has had to say on the utility of the distinction between additive and subtrac-

tive bilingualism as interrelated with certain, variables among minority language

populations; thus while (1984a:64)

The distinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism is

useful in delineating a- gross difference between bilingual acquisi-

tion contexts . . . the distinction fails to-explain the very large

differences in educational- performance between groups of minority

language children in subtractive situations. Not all groups of

minority language children perform poorly at school; in fact, studies

carried out by the Toronto Board of Education .- . show that, with

the exception of children whose mother tongue is French, minority

language children who were born in Canada tended to have higher

academic achievement and were more likely to be in high academic

streams than unilingual children, born in Canada, whose mother tongue

was English. ... However, for groups of minority children such as

the French in Ontario . . . , the Finns in Sweden, and Hispanic and

Indian children in North America, substantial deficits in educational

achievement have been reported. These findings cannot be wholly

accounted for by the notion of subtractive bilingualism since the

minority language children in the Toronto Board of Education studies

are also in subtractive situations.

So there are minority language children and minority language children, and in

this sense Cummins makes thoughtful use of John Ogbu's tripartite classification

of minority groups into "autonomous," "immigrant" and "caste" minorities (Cummins

1984e:82): though the last of these may indeed be mostly immigrant in origin, as

is the case for example with Mexican-Americans, they are best classified as a

"caste" minority for reasons social and historical. What Cummins means by

29

"ambivalence towards the dominant language" is--in pop psych terms--that the

alloglottic caste minoritarian is involved in a like/dislike, or love/hate, or

push/pull relationship with the particular L2: it is the widely-accepted lang-

uage necessary for economic advancement but it is also the language of the his-

torical enemy, etc. The world abounds in such situations and they need not be

delved into further here. Suffice it to say that in a program such as BIP, one

can envision the presence as authority figure (teacher) of a fellow allophonic

though bilingual ethnic as serving to validate the presence of the ambivalently-

viewed L2 as the primary medium of instruction, all the more so since this same

authority figure also validates the heretofore insecurely-viewed Ll by using

it as a medium of instruction as well.

Attitudinal considerations, then, convince me that the Ll component is

necessary to the EPISD's immersion program for hispanomonomatriphonic students

and under similar conditions in-the-United States and elsewhere, just as the

relative superiority of the Bilingual Immersion Program's test results has con-

vinced me that in settings such as El Paso where the minority language enjoys

considerable strength and salience, some form of majority-language immersion is

preferable both to transitional bilingual education and minority-language immer-

sion, which do not provide an adequate basis for accessing a language that is

socially remote to greater or lesser degrees, and, thus, for the inevitable

transition to instruction through the majority language exclusively. My ad-

vocacy of BIP, however, should not be construed as an insistence that this pro-

gram as presently constituted represents the best of all possible schooling

worlds. Instead, BIP represents a superior educational alternative, a step on

the road to a better education, but not a panacea.

30

NOTES

1Between 1974 and ca. 1980, Cummins' publications almost always list his

first name as James, but since then it has usually appeared as Jim. The present

paper's Bibliography has not sought to follow these shifts.

2Torrance et al. 1982's statistical analysis and testing program are mini-

mal at best and could not serve as an adequate basis for comparison with the

EPISD's or any other district's program. I am obligated to Tim Allen, Director

{though not until after 1982}, Second Language Education, San Diego City Schools,

for sending me a copy of Torrance et al. 1982 and discussing various curricular

matters with me over the phone.

'3My thanks go to Ken Thomas, Associate Superintendent for Curriculum, EPISD,

and the staff members of the Office for Research and Evaluation, EPISD. for pro -'

viding me with a copy of the report.

-31

REFERENCES

Adiv, Ellen. 1980. An analysis of second language performance in two types of

immersion programs. Bulletin of the Canadian Association of Applied Ling-

uistics, 2, 139-152.

Bhatnager, Joti. 1980. Linguistic behavior and adjustment of immigrant

children in French and English schools in Montreal. International Jour-

nal of Applied Psychology, 29, 141-158.

Cummins, James and M. Gulatsan. 1974: Bilingual education and cognition.

Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 20, 259-269.

Cummins, James. 1977a. Alberta program promotes minority languages. The

Linguistic Reporter, 20(2), 3, (November 1977).

1977b. Cognitive factors associated with the attainment of

intermediate levels of bilingual- skills. Modern Language Journal, 61,

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